Losing won’t rest easily on Babcock’s shoulders. DiManno,
New Maple Leafs head coach isn’t one to tolerate losing, players better be ready for it
Wham bam and thank you Brendan Shanahan. He pulled it off. Mike Babcock as coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Mike Babcock now the third-highest paid Toronto Maple Leaf.
Just behind Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, though with a hell of a lot more job security at the moment.
The purported $50 million smackers over eight years that it took to pry Babcock away from Detroit — and the wooing Buffalo Sabres — can be numbercrunched eight ways from Sunday, depending on how much has been front-end loaded. But money (plus a third-round draft choice for the Red Wings) is the one asset the Leafs have coming out the yinyang. And coach’s wages don’t count against the salary cap.
So, more moolah for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to secure Babcock behind the bench than they shelled out buying the entire Toronto Argonauts franchise. And confirmation of the latter at a press conference Wednesday by MLSE minority owner Larry Tanenbaum usurped by news bulletin of the former.
Of course, should club president Shanahan also invest the GM title on Babcock that would amount to an overall cost-saving. Although no mention was made of such a thing in the release issued, would it not make humongous sense? Removing, at the very least, any awkwardness of a new incoming general manager with a coach already in place.
Shanahan has the middle management team in situ that he wants in “interim” GM and director of player personnel Mark Hunter and assistant GM Kyle Dubas. They can continue to do the donkey work on scouting and contracts interim — as Dave Nonis did for Brian Burke — while Babcock functions as overlord on trades and coaching hires in the system, with Shanahan the Big Boss above him and a who-knows CEO to be named later, because MLSE has done everything backwards. Unconventional, which thus far has been Shanahan’s signature. But at least he’d have the management cadre squared up in time for the entry draft next month.
To the consternation of his critics, Shanahan did have a master plan in place all along. That plotting found traction when he and Babcock were both in Prague for the recent world championships. Shanahan was bemused to find himself situated, via rumour and Twit- ter, in Buffalo, apparently negotiating with Babcock when he was in fact nowhere near the city which ultimately came up empty in their hot pursuit of the marquee coach.
By 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Babcock was still undecided, as revealed by Detroit GM Ken Holland, and in Hamlet angst. To be or not to be a Leaf . . . a Sabre . . . a Red Wing. By 11:15 a.m., he’d made his decision. And by 2 p.m., the Leafs had filed a flight plan to Motor City for their private jet, presumably to pick up their expensive gotcha, now the most richly remunerated NHL coach in history. And, should Babcock actually last in Toronto for eight years, the longest-tenured Leaf bench-boss since Punch Imlach. (Fired, re-hired, re-fired.)
The Star could not reach Babcock on Wednesday night. Endless busy signal on his cell phone. But he was teed up for a public un-wrapping at the Air Canada Centre Thursday morning. Best part about Wednesday was all the hockey insiders proven wrong in their prognostications — that Babcock would never come to Toronto, that his free agent availability was all a leverage ploy aimed at the Red Wings, that he would never be so idiotic as to take on this monumental task with a club at its historical nadir point, a decade out of the playoffs and a complete roster mess.
Doubtless the first question Babcock will be asked today: Why? For heaven’s sake. Why would he not? Better men, arguably, have tried and failed. The Leafs are an anvil against which some of the greatest minds in hockey have banged their noggins. But oh my, just imagine the seduction of becoming that guy, the genius who dynamites through the blockade of futility.
Money, you say? The Sabres, with Croesus-wealthy ownership, could likely have matched the Leafs in lucre. And their rebuilding is much further along the grinding process to respectability than Toronto, even without the tiffany bauble of Connor McDavid.
At age 52, Babcock doesn’t have anything to prove, Triple Golden on the international stage — two Olympic triumphs, a world championship — twice coaching Detroit to the Presidents’ Trophy as regular-season points leaders, three times in the Stanley Cup finals and once winning the whole enchilada. Just the once, 2007-08.
Had to re-check that because it just seemed like more, over his 10-year tenure in Detroit.
Babcock’s preference may have been to remain with an organization that is so profoundly sane and well run and boasting 24 straight years in the post-season. The bidding war apparently knocked Detroit off the Babwatch, with one last chance extended and declined on Wednesday. Buffalo was certainly under the impression they’d won that lottery — if not the other — and were in full-blown shock to discover otherwise.
How the shock waves will alter the Leaf landscape remains to be seen.
Babcock, with his bluntness and winning ethic, can quite possibly giddy-up the resuscitation of the Leafs but this remains very much a project in its infancy. What will change, I suspect, is that he will not accept the putrid effort that so confounded Randy Carlyle, a coach of near-equal bona fides who came a cropper in Toronto.
If Kessel (assuming he’s still a Leaf come training camp) et al bring their half-assed tendencies to the rink, Babcock will kick ’em, hard, in that part of the anatomy. There will be consequences. There will be benchings. And, one can hope, there will be more interest among free agents in coming to Toronto to play for Babcock, precisely because of the robust hockey culture he engenders — and which Shanahan experienced in the one season he toiled for him in Detroit.
Social media — which I detest and which reflects nothing of import — was divided on Wednesday between over-the-moon and big deal, doesn’t change the dreadful on-ice equation one iota. Perhaps we’ve just forgotten how to feel good about anything. Nothing grand ever happens here. The sports gods don’t like us, grumble-grumble-grumble.
Be not so cynical. Mike Babcock is a game-changer. Losing will not rest easily on his shoulders. And though unquestionably there will be much losing to come, he will not allow it to rest easily on the shoulders of his players either.
That’s what made this past season so manifestly intolerable. They stopped giving a tinker’s damn.
Try that with Babcock at the helm and it will be a voyage of the damned — straight out of town.